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Is your top management dead in the water? Are your
SES bosses living in silos and afraid to even look
outside the boss? Senior Correspondent Mike Causey
wants to know: Is shuffling the SES deck a good
idea?

In my agency, the cadre of folks being groomed for SES are primarily unqualified minorities and white women. These are unqualified people that get pegged GS-14 and GS-15 slots (in violation of merit promotion), stay for a year and then we get an announcement they are all of a sudden in the SES Development Program. One of these folks adds columns in Excel with a habd calculator because they do not know how to use the add sum feature. Yes, it is a joke. As the cadre of unqualified SES's reaches critical mass, as the vast exodus of experienced white males leaves in droves, we will be in an even bigger mess.

Hector............and how qualified are you for the these spots?? After years and years of going no where, "white" women and minorities are moving ahead of you that are more then qualified and more then likely better then you are!!

The good are underappreciated and underpaid; the bad are overpaid and under-employed. For those who are qualified, well, managers and leaders are not interchangeable widgets, any more than qualified analysts, engineers, or doctors are interchangeable. We all specialize in a few areas and should stay in those areas where we can continue to be the most productive. I am not SES, nor would I want to be. It just isn't worth it.

Proving that he is right where he needs to be. We all should be grateful for his efforts, but I see him as more of an entrepreneur, e.g. seeing a need and meeting it, rather than a manager, which is to get things done through people. Funny thing about labor problems, is that when the worker tells management there are problems, management will either sacrifice the manager or double down on a losing hand. What causes this, other than wrong people in the chain?

I've worked with dozens of SESers in my career.Here's my humble opinion.SESers become too focused on the organizational politics.They become gun shy on making meaningful decisions.They delegate the key decisions to subordinate managers and are quick to throw the subordinate managers under the bus when it makes the SESers look bad.Far too many SESers receive bonuses for less than adequate performance.The working folks have little or no respect for SESers.They see them as no value added personnel as far as getting the critical work done.SES is a classic example of an idea that was great in theory but does not work in the real world.Just go back to the GS 16/17/18 concept.The current SES pay band structure is a joke.

Fourteen years ago, my agency paid several million dollars to an outside consulting firm to “reorganize” us. It was supposed to make us a flatter, more transparent and effective agency. Instead, more executive positions were added, along with a cadre of GS-14 and GS-15 analysts. The consulting firm subscribed to the theory that you did not have to know how to do the job – you only had to know how to manage people. Since the shake-up, many of our top executives come from the outside, having never done the front line jobs and rising through the ranks [hopefully] based on merit. Many of the lesser executives rose quickly due to their ethnic backgrounds and gender. These executives are constantly adding new burdens onto the front line employees and managers. Those that dictate how we do our jobs have either never done the job themselves, or when they did, they were incompetent. The top managers do not consult with those of us in the trenches when the decree a new, better way of doing things. Many SES’ers have one thing in common – the desire to land a lucrative job in private practice once they leave our agency. In order to attract the job offers, the SES’ers are quite cozy with the private sector. So cozy in fact, that when congress passed and the president signed into law a new statute that would have helped to root out a particular type of corruption, one of our top dogs issued mandatory guidance which rendered the law useless. I agree that we need to be a government by the people, for the people, and of the people. Perhaps extreme greed and corruption is so rampant in the private sector that in order to have such a government, we need to assimilate to such mainstream values. The SES program needs a shake-up all right.

My experience with SES types is that they would prefer to be somewhere else. Take an SES exec who likes the DC area, stick them in Cleveland,, and you will see a quick departure. I served under one SES exec who had delusions of grandeur. She was more paranoid than Humphrey Bogart in the Caine Mutiny. She actually wanted to give all her managers a "jack in the box" toy to remind us to think outside the box. Another exec was the "invisible man." Never saw him and got an email about once every six months. Every year I receive the list of new SES candidates and, without fail, I will see a former front line manager on the list who couldn't manage a Waffle House.